Commercial buildings account for 18% of the total annual energy use in the United States, which makes energy conservation efforts in office environments crucial to meeting future energy-reduction goals. As existing building stock renews and future buildings become "smarter," occupant-driven loads such as plug loads become more important in regulating energy use. Previous studies have focused on adopting sensors and informatics to benchmark and reduce plug load usage and modeled the impacts of various energy interventions on occupant loads by using standard occupant schedules over relatively short periods of time. However, wireless network disruptions and manual plug load data management for technology driven interventions, variability of individual occupant schedules, and lack of occupant engagement have all been identified as challenges to both accurately quantifying and further reducing the energy use on campus. In this paper, we discuss the aforementioned challenges in the light of our experiences in installing plug load management systems to 86 work desks in a high-performance office building on the University of Washington campus. The installation process is discussed both from occupants' and research team's point of view. As a conclusion, we propose a set of recommendations for the technical realization of future energy intervention studies.
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